1/28/2024 0 Comments Sublime in gothic literature![]() Like Gothic and contemporary fantasy novels, time-slip novels explore and transgress boundaries between past and present, between what is familiar and what is strange. Bakhtin and Gilles Deleuze, among others. Here, Vránková makes strategic use of the theories of M.M. Fantasy literature's potency comes from its realization of these confrontations between visible and invisible conflicts that underscore the relationship between the self and the cosmos as well as the self in community with others.Ĭhapter Eight, ‘Repetition in Time-Travel Fantasy: Adventure of Choice or Destiny?’, focuses on an important subgenre of children's fantasy. The more critically and theoretically acclaimed metafictional fantasy, while it may seem to deconstruct the epic and folk formulas on which other fantasies depend, actually serves to reinforce the underlying ethic they mutually uphold: ‘hat they really put in doubt is rather a casual, disinterested attitude to these values than the values themselves’ (117). Yet they remain living traditions because, as Vránková notes, they ‘revive the emotions and ideas’ which remain compelling even in ‘the confusing, commercial and chaotic atmosphere of the modern world’ (117). ‘Closed’, secondary-world fantasies stage such developmental plots metaphorically, on an epic model. These encounters ‘lead the heroes towards what really matters (.) a better knowledge of their position in and relationship to the surrounding world’ (113). Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), closed, secondary world fantasy stages encounters with magical and supernatural Others. Vránková's application of these notions, aided by Jonathan Goldthwaite's typology of fantasy, shows how different subgenres approach these issues. Rowling to the less-well known Jenny Nimmo and Fiona Higgins, Vránková deftly shows how notions of the Sublime inform children's fantasy, horror, and other fiction to construct a dialogue between self and other, past and present, life and death (114). Ranging through an exhaustive survey of contemporary fantasists from Philip Pullman and J.K. ![]() And it is in the foregrounding of terror and extremity that children's fantasy fiction most urgently poses ethical questions. As she notes, children's fantasy, like the Gothic novel, explores the boundaries of reality and consciousness, pushes against and violates norms, and stages ethical confrontations in stark binaries (110). ![]() In her discussion of how notions of the Sublime become an integral part of children's fantasy literature, Vránková shows the links between Coleridge's generation and the postmodern ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas. Coleridge saw the sublime, therefore, as a vehicle for teaching religious truths. Coleridge, who well understood both poles, maintained the value of imaginative literature in helping children apprehend the great and the vast, a doorway to transcendence. As eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century thinkers grappled with the risks and challenges of human imaginative endeavors, children were seen as particularly susceptible, whether in the form of night fears and anxieties or unfettered ecstatic visionary experiences. From my perspective, her discussion of recent children's literature is valuable for its synthesis summarizing and explaining the intellectual traditions that inform contemporary fantasy.Ĭhapter Seven, ‘Searching for the Other: Ethical Aspects of Fantasy Adventure in Contemporary Ango-American Fiction for Children’, describes a lengthy tradition of morally-inflected imaginative narratives that explore the challenges, ambiguities, and imperatives of desire. In her monograph Metamorphosis of the Sublime, Kamila Vránková articulates an impressive range of philosophical, theoretical, and literary texts to study treatments of the Sublime over three centuries. České Budějovice: Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích – Pedagogická fakulta, 2019. Metamorphoses of the Sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children's Literature. ![]() New Reviews Metamorphoses of the Sublime: From Ballads and Gothic Novels to Contemporary Anglo-American Children's Literature
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